Boysie Singh is not a good man. A poor father, a brutal lover, a pirate and a gangster, he strikes fear into those who cross his path. We know this through the testimony of the women in his life: Popo, a sex worker for whom he has a vicious passion; Mana Lala, the mother of his son, Chunksee; Rosie, a shopkeeper who remembers him as a “raggedy” orphan; and Doris, a social-climbing beauty who carries herself “like I already married a rich man and was living in a big, brick house with a motor car parked up outside”.
Ingrid Persaud’s vivid and fitfully violent novel is the fictionalised story of the real-life Singh, who terrorised the denizens of Port of Spain and the Gulf of Paria in the 1940s and 50s. Boysie is bad news but he also has a rare charisma, which means women can rarely resist him. At the start, we learn via a newspaper article that Boysie has been hanged for murder. Shortly before he died, he protested his innocence, claiming: “I always tried to help people and that is how I got a great deal of my troubles. That is what has me here now.” The hangman, the article continues, “was paid $77 per man for his duties.”
This story, which alternates between the four women, is told in Trinidadian dialect and narrated by Persaud (who reads Mana Lala), Melanie La Barrie (Popo), Martina Laird (Doris) and Chanel Quesnel (Rosie). Their performances are lively and richly textured, with each character viewing this dangerous man through the lens of their own experience and desires.
• Available via Faber, 14hr 11min
Further listening
Boy from the Valleys
Luke Evans, Penguin Audio, 9hr 50min
The Hobbit actor reads his memoir which plots his path from Pontypool in south Wales where he was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness all the way to Hollywood.
The New Life
Tom Crewe, Penguin Audio, 13hr 33min
The actor Freddie Fox narrates Crewe’s accomplished debut novel about hidden lives and repressed desire in late Victorian London
